Wednesday, May 24, 2017

A fairly common recommendation for reducing police misconduct is to
increase use of body cameras. By recording police-citizen encounters,
police supervisors, judges, reporters, and others can get objective
evidence of what happened instead of self-serving hearsay.
The proposal is gaining popularity, but it is also more complicated
than most people realize. First, there are privacy concerns for persons
who do not want their police encounters on the evening news or splashed
across social media. Second, the costs involved in maintaining a body
camera system are not insignificant. Those costs have to be weighed
against other police needs and other reform measures.Do police body cameras improve police behavior?
The short answer is that it is too early to tell. However, the
results from the several studies on police body cameras are encouraging.
One of the most cited police body camera studies
was conducted in Rialto, California between February 2012 and February
2013. During the trial, 54 front line officers were randomly assigned to
either wear body cameras or to not wear the cameras while on shift. Of
the 988 shifts examined by researchers, officers wore body cameras in
489 and did not in 499. Researchers compared the number of use-of-force
incidents and complaints against police in the trial period to previous
years. The results, based on data from the trial, are below.
At first glance, it might be tempting to correlate the reduction in
use-of-force incidents and complaints against the police with the
introduction of body cameras. But, it is important to keep in mind that
the Rialto trial began in February 2012; only a month after a new chief
took over the department. The new chief, William A. Farrar, was one of
the authors of the Rialto study and he implemented several reforms after
starting his new job. Thus, it is difficult to determine now much of
the decline in use-of-force incidents and complaints can be directly
attributed to the police body cameras. The Rialto study also cannot
explain whether the drop in use-of-force incidents and complaints can be
attributed to police or citizens changing their behavior. As the
researchers wrote, “we do not know on which party in an encounter the
cameras have had an effect on, or how the two effects — on officers and
on suspects — interact.”
While it is the case that police body cameras cannot conclusively be
shown to improve citizen or police behavior this is not in and of itself
an argument against the use of police body cameras. Body camera footage
has proved valuable in investigations into police misconduct.What are the privacy implications of body cameras?
Police body cameras raise privacy concerns. The indiscriminate
release of body camera footage could have a devastating effect on the
victims of crime. Those crafting police body camera policy have to
effectively balance privacy with the desire to hold police officers
accountable for their actions.
What does such a policy look like? Legislators, law enforcement
organizations, and civil liberty groups have all made police body camera
recommendations. However, some police departments that use body cameras
either do not have policies in place or do not release them.
In October 2014 the ACLU asked
twenty of the largest police departments as well as 10 departments that
attended a body camera conference hosted by the Police Executive
Research Forum (PERF) for their body camera policies. According to the
ACLU’s Sonia Roubini, “Only five of these thirty departments sent me
their policies. The remaining twenty-five cited various reasons for not
doing so.” Of those five departments only one had its police body camera
policy available online.
It is especially important that body camera policies be public
because the nature of a police officer’s job means that he will often
see citizens at tragic and embarrassing moments. There is an
understandable concern related to the release of footage involving not
only victims of crime but also children, accidents, and the inside of
private residences, hospitals, and schools.
Lawmakers across the U.S. have responded to privacy concerns in a
variety of ways. In North Dakota the governor signed a bill exempting
police body camera footage “taken in a private place” from public record
requests, while in Florida and Michigan lawmakers introduced bills which would limit the release of police body camera footage captured inside a citizen’s home. Florida’s bill, SB 248,
would also limit the release of footage captured within “health care,
mental health care, or social services” facilities as well as “at the
scene of a medical emergency involving a death or involving an injury
that requires transport to a medical facility.” Proposed New Hampshire legislation would require police officers to wear body cameras, but would exempt the footage from public record requests.
Civil liberty groups and non-profits have also made body camera policy proposals. Police Executive Research Forum published a paper
on implementing a police body camera policy, which recommended that
some recordings should be prohibited. Among the recordings PERF
recommended prohibiting are those of strips searches, conversations with
informants, and those that take place “where a reasonable expectation
of privacy exists.”
An ACLU paper
said that the release of body camera footage should depend on whether
the footage is “flagged” or “unflagged.” Flagged footage would include
footage that captures use-of-force incidents, arrests, detentions, or an
incident subject to a complaint. Unflagged footage would be footage
that does not include the “flagged” incidents just described.
The paper recommends that unflagged footage be deleted after weeks,
and that unflagged and unredacted footage should not be released without
the consent of the subject. Flagged footage should be available to the
public even in cases when redaction is not possible “because in such
cases the need for oversight generally outweighs the privacy interests
at stake.”
The storing and redaction of body camera footage is a time consuming
as well as expensive undertaking. During the time of a police body
camera study in Mesa, Arizona, three police body camera videos were
forwarded to the Mesa Police Department Video Services Unit. The videos,
which ranged from one to two hours long, took a total of 30.5 hours to
edit for redaction.1
In May 2015 the Associated Press reported
that Cleveland expected to spend at least half a million dollars a year
simply to store, maintain, and replace the body cameras. The AP also
reported that the combined cost of 1,500 Taser body cameras and the data
storage could be up to $3.3 million over five years. The Albany Democrat-Heraldreported
that body camera footage storage was affecting the court system in Linn
County, Oregon. The body cameras being used by two police agencies in
the county have significantly contributed to the amount of data being
stored by the Linn County District Attorney’s office, which in 2011 had
45 gigabytes of media downloads, compared with 351 gigabytes of
downloaded evidence in the first three months of 2015.
Improvements in technology will undoubtedly make the redaction and
storage of police body camera footage less expensive. But, for the
foreseeable future, the redaction and storage of police body camera
footage will continue to impose a significant cost to law enforcement
agencies. Indeed, cost is sometimes cited by police agencies as a reason
why body cameras have not been deployed. In 2014 PERF conducted a survey
of police departments and found that “39 percent of the respondents
that do not use body-worn cameras cited cost as a primary reason.”
It is possible that some of the fiscal impact of police body camera
footage redaction and storage could be offset by the impact the cameras
have on litigation arising from bogus complaints. However, it remains to
be seen if that will be the case.
Of course the cost of a police body camera policy will depend in part
on what footage is redacted. As noted above, redaction contributes to
the cost of body camera programs. A policy that strictly limits
redaction of footage captured in public and redacts some material filmed
inside a private residence would be less expensive (all else being
equal) than a policy that requires a heavy degree of redaction of
footage captured in public.What does the increased use of body cameras mean for American policing?
It is still too soon to tell. As mentioned above, it is not yet clear
what effect, if any, body cameras have on citizens or police officers.
In addition, it is the case that instances of police misconduct have
occurred despite the officers involved wearing body cameras. This
shouldn’t be too surprising given that police officers have been caught
behaving poorly in front of dash cams.
But, the use of police body cameras is supported across political and
racial demographics, as the following graphs based on April 2015 YouGov
polling show:2
In the coming years an increasing number of Americans will come to
expect that their police officers be equipped with body cameras.
Advances in technology will make this expectation more pronounced as the
cost of using police body cameras decreases.
While police body cameras do have potential to improve law
enforcement accountability and provide extra evidence, they are not a
police misconduct panacea. Reducing incidents of police misconduct
requires not only body cameras, but also reforms of use-of-force policy
and training as well as changes to how police misconduct is
investigated.Conclusion

The research on police body cameras is limited but encouraging.

Police body cameras do pose privacy concerns, but those concerns can be resolved with the right policies in place.

The public widely supports police officers wearing body cameras, but
the technology alone is not a panacea for police misconduct.